Maxed-Out Kindness

Pino's favor showed itself first in the way the maids treated me.

"You needn't lift a finger, my lady. I'll see to all of it."

"Your hand isn't troubling you, is it? Please, allow me to help."

"No, no. You can just stay as you are. Hm? Of course not. Being permitted to assist you is an honor, my lady."

The goodwill had blown straight past maximum and into the way one handles a small child. I am not joking. If I so much as tripped, I could already hear one of them striking the floor and delivering a line like, "You wicked floor! How dare you trip the young lady?! I'll teach you a lesson!"

It was plausible enough that a cold sweat broke out on me.

Maybe it's because I grew up dirt-poor—a dirt spoon, as we say back home—but I genuinely couldn't tell whether this was normal. Does everyone upstairs live like this? Having someone help you dress or bathe is a scene novels trot out often enough, so I'll allow it. But trying to eat for me as well? Wasn't that a little excessive?

Not that I disliked it. Who would, being treated as something precious? It was outrageously comfortable.

"Well, I'm grateful."

In possession stories of this sort, the usual cliché is the protagonist getting dragged into one incident after another until the whole plot is a mess. My situation, by comparison, was remarkably solid. The strongest being in the setting was sheltering me—that much was certain. Daily life wasn't inconvenient, either, and somewhere along the way I had even achieved the dream of every person from Korea: a home of my own.

And whether you looked at it with a greedy adult's eyes or with Little Prince ver. eyes, my room was something that had passed rapture and arrived at madness. It was obscenely vast, for one thing. The furniture all looked like the finest money could buy, and beyond that there was a study lined with countless books, every sort of instrument, a swimming pool, exercise facilities, and even—a lawn (?).

This was not a room of this world. A limited Fantasy Edition, maybe? I had never imagined I would feel the fantasy of it all in a place like this.

"It really is nice, being this comfortable."

Which meant my worries had nowhere to go but toward the person sending all that favor my way. That she liked me was something to be grateful for, and the fact itself made me genuinely happy. I wanted to return the kindness, too, and I even nursed a small wish that the returning might happen in a space with only the two of us.

But relationships are a subtle thing, aren't they? Becoming friends? Of course that would be good. It would be good, and yet it doesn't happen just because you want it to, and hoping too hard starts to feel like a burden.

It's vague from the very start. "Become friends," as a goal?

If the aim were something clear—conquer the world, defeat so-and-so—I could at least guess what plan to make and how to move. As things stood, I could not predict her next action at all. I wouldn't have been able to predict an ordinary person either, and my counterpart was a witch who had gone centuries without a friend. I had no idea what bizarre event might trigger, and that, more than anything, worried me.

Given Pino's personality, it might even be dangerous.

In the original story, she was rated on the same level as a natural disaster. Something you could neither avoid nor stop. You did not make an enemy of her, and you did not touch her if you could help it. If she set her sights on you, you simply accepted it, calmly. That understanding comes through to the bone in lines from the work itself.

The characters Pino swept away, including the one who spoke those lines, were villains, so the story never lingered much on questions of morality. Separate from the favor she showed me, though, her character sat infinitely close to evil. Misanthropy and a refusal to trust human beings were her passives, and even the trivial act of someone speaking to her detonated a cold fury. Watching her be lonely on top of all that was a little ironic, but once you considered her past, it made sense again.

At any rate, that her personality was absolute garbage was a very clear fact.

"She ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠must be pinning her hopes on me because she thinks I'm different from other people..."

Hsss. From the position of an equally filthy ordinary person, it was a bit of a burden. I was extremely confident in my ability to coo and fuss over someone, but the hierarchy of power was split so perfectly that I wouldn't even be able to resist. I prefer being on top to being underneath. Awkward.

No—before any of that, the real problem was that there simply wasn't much information.

"She isn't the protagonist, and she isn't the heroine either. If there were a lot of information on her, that would be the stranger thing."

Pino was, to borrow from other works, the sort of joyless invincible character you get with Exodia from Yu-Gi-Oh, or Dragon Ball's three-striped-slipper dwarf. Not on the hero's side, not quite on the enemy's side either, and no one could say what she might do next—the author's doted-on original character, or a fixer for the plot. That was about the position she occupied.

Put it bluntly: when that character Yujiro shows up in a certain fighting manga and kills whoever he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠likes, nobody objects, right? Oh, the one with the rotten personality can kill a person or two. You shrug, and that's the end of it. Pino was the same. Roughly speaking, her role was to clean up the messes the protagonist couldn't—turds too enormous, or too ambiguous to simply call evil. She did take the protagonist's head afterward, but that was the author being awful. Our girl doesn't bite.

"So the problem is that I barely know anything..."

What I did know came down to the things she had done in the story, the details released through the media mix, the pitiful life laid out in Part 1, and the fact that she wanted to be friends with me now. Most of it concerned her abilities, which was honestly a little frustrating. And I couldn't just ask her outright.

Isn't the basic plot of a possession story to cruise along on an overwhelming information advantage? This restricted playthrough was far too harsh.

"Hmm...?"

And then a single possibility occurred to me. Was it really true that I couldn't use what I knew?

"Maybe..."

Maybe I could.

My eyes went to the maids, hurrying about their work.

As in other shonen manga, special abilities exist in Vanguard as well. Collectively they are called Inalienable Rights, and whenever a character uses an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ability in the story, that phrase appears beside the ability's name. There is exactly one character beside whom a different phrase appears. Well, no point drawing it out. That person was Pino.

Scenes of her actually using her ability amounted to once or twice in the whole work, but whenever she did, the words that surfaced were not Inalienable Rights. They were Extraterritoriality. Readers had questions. Even the protagonist, the most special character in the manga, was labeled with Inalienable Rights—so why did she alone receive that peculiar designation? Did it mean something?

And a community was never going to let a topic like that slide. A debate opened, as these things do.

A discussion that was both reasonably deep and extremely vulgar went on for quite a while. It grew popular enough inside the community to be bundled like a series and pinned to the announcements. I laughed a great deal, reading it. Good memories. Every one of them a captain of creativity, I swear.

And one of those memories concerned her ability.

The point was that the people she kept as thralls retained their personalities. It was a sound argument. Abilities that let you command someone as a thrall were not rare in the story; count clones and you would easily reach double digits. A common power. Strength in numbers is simple and strong, so I understood the appeal. But among those abilities, I didn't remember a single set of thralls who, like Pino's, kept their own personalities and went on living ordinary days.

Of course, once you passed under her, fanaticism toward her attached itself as a passive—though she herself had hated that intensely. In short, her thralls were puppets with selves: fanatically loyal to their superior, and yet hated by her all the same. Very pitiful creatures.

Which raised a question. If a lovely friend (pending) approached thralls like that and tried to get close, what reaction would come out? Jealousy? Anger? Well. Something would come out, wouldn't it?

It was definitely worth testing.

"Hey. Yuri, could you come here a moment?"

Big sis needs a secret friend right now, you know? Want to be secret friends with big sis?